Strategy Session

I watched a “teardown” of the Toyota Prius at the Embedded Systems Conference yesterday in San Jose. Within minutes the engineers had removed six of the car’s subsystems, which they planned to analyze separately in front of an audience of engineers over the next three days. David Carey of Portelligent and Al Steier of Munro & Associates do teardown analyses for a living, and they got right to it by analyzing the innards of the Prius user interface/dash module.

I thought, here’s a cut and dry way to see how something works. Too bad it’s not as easy when it comes to looking at how your business ticks. Ah, a look under the hood: You have employment issues and HR issues overall (that’s a big one), operations issues, financial pressures (especially if you run a publicly held company)—just to name a few.

How many executives actually “tear apart” their businesses and analyze what’s under the hood? I’m sure many do to a certain degree. Tell me what you do to get a pulse on how your company is working. And you experts out there, please feel free to weigh in with some advice if the spirit moves you!